Citizens United v. FEC and the death of democracy

“Free speech” has just been used to annihilate free speech and democracy. The Supreme Court, in its ruling on Citizens United v. FEC, unleashed Thursday a force capable of destroying the very principles that founded this nation. There is no evidence that the Framers of our Constitution wanted unregulated spending on elections by corporations as part of our democracy, and as corporations have become larger and more powerful than they have ever been in history, this bodes ominously for the power of a single vote and the speech of individual citizens. As conservatives cheer the preservation of free speech, they miss the mark; money cannot be considered truly speech because its purpose is exactly the opposite, and corporations ought not to be considered constitutionally-protected persons because their power lies in their size, not in the Constitutional weight of their rights.

The amazingly convoluted verdict overturned a century’s worth of jurisprudence on campaign spending and free speech rulings, and created a paradigm in which the outcome of every election can be heavily influenced, if not predetermined, by the will of corporations; limited only by their desires to involve themselves financially in particular elections. The Court affirmed two controversial notions that have become common in Constitutional law, notions which are individually mischievous, but collectively disastrous, to the free speech rights of individuals: corporate personhood and the speech value of money.

The first erroneous notion is that corporations can and ought to be protected by the Bill of Rights. Maybe this is just my layman’s understanding speaking, but there is absolutely nothing in the Constitution that justifies to me the applicability of a document that refers to individual rights to corporate entities. Group entities already carry an inherent power in their corporate nature that dwarfs that of an individual, but by further empowering these groups by giving them the same rights reserved for citizens, corporations have become increasingly impervious to legislative restrictions on their actions. It is hard enough to rein them in, seeing how often corporations influence the composition and agenda of Congress by the power of the lobby. Now, they have not only the lobbies, but unlimited access to their own profits for spending on candidate ads, negative ads, and the funding of private organizing efforts, amidst other avenues of spending that have yet to be discovered.

In addition to this control over the formation of public opinion, corporations have further been freed to alter and control the opinions of elected officials. The sheer threat of spending on an opponent in the next election could be enough to sway Congressional votes on key legislation to be more in accordance with the interests of corporations than the people. The problem with this type of influence is that the threat of money spent, in addition to the actual spending, becomes a speech act, and therefore the potential to speak has become more powerful than speech itself.

Which brings me to the second error in judgment of the Court, and that is in the determination that the spending of money is a speech act. The fact is that money can buy speech, but to designate the spending of money as speech itself is to doubly empower those with disparately large amounts of it relative to any other person or group. When one corporation with a board of directors can decide to involve itself in an election, and spend literally millions of dollars on a candidate, or on ads in support of that candidate or in opposition to his or her opponent, no amount of speech can counter the ability of money to influence public opinion and/or election outcomes. Essentially, from this point on, you can never trust your own opinion, because there is no way to ensure that your vote is a genuine choice or purchased by the weight of millions of dollars in biased, targeted, corporate-backed advertising tailored to falsify and obscure your real interests.

We had just witnessed the potential for this in the health care debate, in which obscured interests led to the destruction of a valuable public policy option; and this was merely a single issue and restrictions on corporations were still in place. The health care industry defeated health care reform by scaring, conning, and duping the public into shifting their priorities away from their interests. Imagine our nation after this verdict: corporations will be able to sink every candidate who favors health care reform, insurance reform, bank reform, credit reform, environmental reform, corruption reform, ethics reform, or finance reform before they ever arrive in office. Worse, even if such a candidate could ever overcome the enormous obstacles to gain public office, there is no limit on how much money can be used to persuade such a candidate to change his or her stance on an issue through offer of re-election aid or through the threat of funding his or her opposition in the next election.

No other democracy on the planet has placed the rights of corporations so highly above those of its citizens so as to annihilate the very power of the vote; for the vote is the primary form of speech protected by the Constitution, the first and last speech act necessary for the survival of a democracy. Unfortunately, the vote can no longer be trusted, as our opinions will be formed for us in the form of incessant overt and subliminal advertising targeted specifically to obscure issues that matter in favor of misdirection and suppressed consciousness. The power of a single voice, a single opinion, a single vote, no matter how much in the right, can and will fall before the power of money to buy, change, and obscure public opinion to the contrary.

Are we a nation of people, or a nation of businesses? Whose rights are paramount? By conflating and equating the two the Supreme Court has made the one vastly more powerful than the other. What matters my speech, when weighed against that of billions of dollars of campaign contributions? What matter your feelings on a candidate or issue, if they are at odds with the desires of, say, Exxon or Wal-Mart? Simply put: they matter not at all.

The Supreme Court, in the name of the First Amendment, has combined two dreadfully misguided interpretations of Constitutional law and created a monstrous paradigm that can and will reshape America fundamentally if allowed to mature. Regardless of the primacy of the First Amendment, it is the height of ignorance and irresponsible Constitutional law to elevate corporations to full personhood and grant them full First Amendment protection while considering money a form of speech.

Money is anti-speech. It stifles speech; it prevents discussion. It changes minds without offering ideas. It alters perceptions without providing reason or rationale. It corrupts with impunity. With this decision, the Supreme Court has legalized bribery of highest and most despicable order; and all the more repugnant is that we as citizens sat by and watched it happen. Worse still, some of us cheered and applauded.

Money can buy speech, stifle speech; but money is not speech. Speech is by its nature an inherently unlimited resource; you and I can exercise speech according to our wishes without restriction. Money, on the other hand, is an inherently limited and unequal resource. By classifying and preserving money as speech, the Court empowers wealthy corporations with an unequal, undemocratic and, in my opinion, unconstitutional right to speech that outweighs that of any individual citizen or less endowed collective of citizens. To treat money as speech is to give those who possess more of it double the potency in their speech over any other political entity; both in the act represented by the spending of money itself, and in what that money produces in the policy views of candidates and public officials. No voice or force of reason can fight a political force backed by money, when money itself is a political force with its own will. The “invisible hand” will guide our politics as surely as it guides the business interests of the market.

Our understanding of power at the Constitutional level is fundamentally flawed. By empowering monetary speech that occurs prior to the public discourse, corporations can now effectively limit our choices of candidates to only those they are willing to fund, for only they will be able to compete for our vote in competing for the corporare funding now necessary to win an election. In doing so, corporations now have the power to eliminate entire sets of interests from the arena of public debate by refusing to back candidates; and you can be sure they will do so.

The Executive and Legislative branches have but one chance to get the reaction to this right. They need to implement strong restrictions on corporate behavior. They ought to seriously consider a Constitutional amendment redefining speech to exclude the spending of money by group entities. They also need to seriously consider impeaching one or all of the five justices who continue to rule in favor of corporations at every turn, for failing to act in accordance with their sworn duties to the public interest. And you and I, as members of the public, must fight this ruling together with every fiber of resistance we can muster. These reactions appear extreme; but understand, they are no less extreme than the assault on democracy carried out by five rogue individuals on Thursday, the 21st of January, 2010.

The Court in its current composition is no longer legitimate. It is radically irresponsible and despicably transparent in its political character. It has come to embody the very antithesis of what the Court was intended to be; a safeguard for individual liberty and custodian of the Constitution. It is instead an activist Court bent on reshaping the character of democracy so far as to make it nearly mute. This is clear in the Court’s decision to refuse to rule on this case initially, calling instead for reargument, and then further failing to rule only on the case itself- opting instead to use this case as an opportunity to exercise a particular and obvious political and ideological agenda. The Court has had one of its darkest days; what was once the bastion of Constitutional freedom in accordance with the intent of the Framers has become the citadel from which citizens’ freedom is to be struck down in wide swaths at a time in favor of corporate “rights”.

Welcome to the Corporate States of America. It was a nice place to live; but where no opinion can any longer be considered freely formed, political life truly ends, and that happened today. My call to you, fellow citizens: fight for your democracy, or watch it die before you. It will not wither; one day, it will simply be no longer there. Wake up and challenge this before it is too late for us all.